Sorry I’ve been missing in action….

I’ve been sick and overwhelmed with life’s minutiae.  Forgive me…I’ll be back soon.

Obamarama: Of National Lies and Racial Amnesia

I’ll give Tim Wise the last word on this blog on this matter…

Of National Lies and Racial Amnesia:
Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and the Audacity of Truth

By Tim Wise
March 18, 2008

Published at http://www.counterpunch.org/wise03182008.html.

For most white folks, indignation just doesn’t wear well. Once affected or conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie that may well have fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which now cuts off somewhere above his navel and makes him look like an idiot.

Indignation doesn’t work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country–the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples–we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.

But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago–occasionally Barack Obama’s pastor, and the man whom Obama credits with having brought him to Christianity–for merely reminding us of those evils about which we have remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned. It is not the crime that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the unwillingness to let it go–these last words being the first ones uttered by most whites it seems whenever anyone, least of all an “angry black man” like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill of particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.

But our collective indignation, no matter how loudly we announce it, cannot drown out the truth. And as much as white America may not be able to hear it (and as much as politics may require Obama to condemn it) let us be clear, Jeremiah Wright fundamentally told the truth.Oh I know that for some such a comment will seem shocking. After all, didn’t he say that America “got what it deserved” on 9/11? And didn’t he say that black people should be singing “God Damn America” because of its treatment of the African American community throughout the years?Well actually, no he didn’t.Wright said not that the attacks of September 11th were justified, but that they were, in effect, predictable. Deploying the imagery of chickens coming home to roost is not to give thanks for the return of the poultry or to endorse such feathered homecoming as a positive good; rather, it is merely to note two things: first, that what goes around, indeed, comes around–a notion with longstanding theological grounding–and secondly, that the U.S. has indeed engaged in more than enough violence against innocent people to make it just a tad bit hypocritical for us to then evince shock and outrage about an attack on ourselves, as if the latter were unprecedented.

He noted that we killed far more people, far more innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than were killed on 9/11 and “never batted an eye.” That this statement is true is inarguable, at least amongst sane people. He is correct on the math, he is correct on the innocence of the dead (neither city was a military target), and he is most definitely correct on the lack of remorse or even self-doubt about the act: sixty-plus years later most Americans still believe those attacks were justified, that they were needed to end the war and “save American lives.”

But not only does such a calculus suggest that American lives are inherently worth more than the lives of Japanese civilians (or, one supposes, Vietnamese, Iraqi or Afghan civilians too), but it also ignores the long-declassified documents, and President Truman’s own war diaries, all of which indicate clearly that Japan had already signaled its desire to end the war, and that we knew they were going to surrender, even without the dropping of atomic weapons. The conclusion to which these truths then attest is simple, both in its basic veracity and it monstrousness: namely, that in those places we committed premeditated and deliberate mass murder, with no justification whatsoever; and yet for saying that I will receive more hate mail, more hostility, more dismissive and contemptuous responses than will those who suggest that no body count is too high when we’re the ones doing the killing. Jeremiah Wright becomes a pariah, because, you see, we much prefer the logic of George Bush the First, who once said that as President he would “never apologize for the United States of America. I don’t care what the facts are.”

And Wright didn’t say blacks should be singing “God Damn America.” He was suggesting that blacks owe little moral allegiance to a nation that has treated so many of them for so long as animals, as persons undeserving of dignity and respect, and which even now locks up hundreds of thousands of non-violent offenders (especially for drug possession), even while whites who do the same crimes (and according to the data, when it comes to drugs, more often in fact), are walking around free. His reference to God in that sermon was more about what God will do to such a nation, than it was about what should or shouldn’t happen. It was a comment derived from, and fully in keeping with, the black prophetic tradition, and although one can surely disagree with the theology (I do, actually, and don’t believe that any God either blesses or condemns nation states for their actions), the statement itself was no call for blacks to turn on America. If anything, it was a demand that America earn the respect of black people, something the evidence and history suggests it has yet to do.

Finally, although one can certainly disagree with Wright about his suggestion that the government created AIDS to get rid of black folks–and I do, for instance–it is worth pointing out that Wright isn’t the only one who has said this. In fact, none other than Bill Cosby (oh yes, that Bill Cosby, the one white folks love because of his recent moral crusade against the black poor) proffered his belief in the very same thing back in the early ’90s in an interview on CNN, when he said that AIDS may well have been created to get rid of people whom the government deemed “undesirable” including gays and racial minorities.

So that’s the truth of the matter: Wright made one comment that is highly arguable, but which has also been voiced by white America’s favorite black man, another that was horribly misinterpreted and stripped of all context, and then another that was demonstrably accurate. And for this, he is pilloried and made into a virtual enemy of the state; for this, Barack Obama may lose the support of just enough white folks to cost him the Democratic nomination, and/or the Presidency; all of it, because Jeremiah Wright, unlike most preachers opted for truth. If he had been one of those “prosperity ministers” who says Jesus wants nothing so much as for you to be rich, like Joel Osteen, that would have been fine. Had he been a retread bigot like Falwell was, or Pat Robertson is, he might have been criticized, but he would have remained in good standing and surely not have damaged a Presidential candidate in this way. But unlike Osteen, and Falwell, and Robertson, Jeremiah Wright refused to feed his parishioners lies.

What Jeremiah Wright knows, and told his flock–though make no mistake, they already knew it–is that 9/11 was neither the first, nor worst act of terrorism on American soil. The history of this nation for folks of color, was for generations, nothing less than an intergenerational hate crime, one in which 9/11s were woven into the fabric of everyday life: hundreds of thousands of the enslaved who died from the conditions of their bondage; thousands more who were lynched (as many as 10,000 in the first few years after the Civil War, according to testimony in the Congressional Record at the time); millions of indigenous persons wiped off the face of the Earth. No, to some, the horror of 9/11 was not new. To some it was not on that day that “everything changed.” To some, everything changed four hundred years ago, when that first ship landed at what would become Jamestown. To some, everything changed when their ancestors were forced into the hulls of slave ships at Goree Island and brought to a strange land as chattel. To some, everything changed when they were run out of Northern Mexico, only to watch it become the Southwest United States, thanks to a war of annihilation initiated by the U.S. government. To some, being on the receiving end of terrorism has been a way of life. Until recently it was absolutely normal in fact.

But white folks have a hard time hearing these simple truths. We find it almost impossible to listen to an alternative version of reality. Indeed, what seems to bother white people more than anything, whether in the recent episode, or at any other time, is being confronted with the recognition that black people do not, by and large, see the world like we do; that black people, by and large, do not view America as white people view it. We are, in fact, shocked that this should be so, having come to believe, apparently, that the falsehoods to which we cling like a kidney patient clings to a dialysis machine, are equally shared by our darker-skinned compatriots.

This is what James Baldwin was talking about in his classic 1972 work, No Name in the Street, wherein he noted:

White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded–about themselves and the world they live in. White people have managed to get through their entire lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so lucky: a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example, sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac.

And so we were shocked in 1987, when Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall declined to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution, because, as he noted, most of that history had been one of overt racism and injustice, and to his way of thinking, the only history worth celebrating had been that of the past three or four decades.

We were shocked to learn that black people actually believed that a white cop who was a documented racist might frame a black man; and we’re shocked to learn that lots of black folks still perceive the U.S. as a racist nation–we’re literally stunned that people who say they experience discrimination regularly (and who have the social science research to back them up) actually think that those experiences and that data might actually say something about the nation in which they reside. Imagine.

Whites are easily shocked by what we see and hear from Pastor Wright and Trinity Church, because what we see and hear so thoroughly challenges our understanding of who we are as a nation. But black people have never, for the most part, believed in the imagery of the “shining city on a hill,” for they have never had the option of looking at their nation and ignoring the mountain-sized warts still dotting its face when it comes to race. Black people do not, in the main, get misty eyed at the sight of the flag the way white people do–and this is true even for millions of black veterans–for they understand that the nation for whom that flag waves is still not fully committed to their own equality. They have a harder time singing those tunes that white people seem so eager to belt out, like “God Bless America,” for they know that whites sang those words loudly and proudly even as they were enforcing Jim Crow segregation, rioting against blacks who dared move into previously white neighborhoods, throwing rocks at Dr. King and then cheering, as so many did, when they heard the news that he had been assassinated.

Whites refuse to remember (or perhaps have never learned) that which black folks cannot afford to forget. I’ve seen white people stunned to the point of paralysis when they learn the truth about lynchings in this country–when they discover that such events were not just a couple of good old boys with a truck and a rope hauling some black guy out to the tree, hanging him, and letting him swing there. They were never told the truth: that lynchings were often community events, advertised in papers as “Negro Barbecues,” involving hundreds or even thousands of whites, who would join in the fun, eat chicken salad and drink sweet tea, all while the black victims of their depravity were being hung, then shot, then burned, and then having their body parts cut off, to be handed out to onlookers. They are stunned to learn that postcards of the events were traded as souvenirs, and that very few whites, including members of their own families did or said anything to stop it.

Rather than knowing about and confronting the ugliness of our past, whites take steps to excise the less flattering aspects of our history so that we need not be bothered with them. So, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example, site of an orgy of violence against the black community in 1921, city officials literally went into the town library and removed all reference to the mass killings in the Greenwood district from the papers with a razor blade–an excising of truth and an assault on memory that would remain unchanged for over seventy years.

Most white people desire, or perhaps even require the propagation of lies when it comes to our history. Surely we prefer the lies to anything resembling, even remotely, the truth. Our version of history, of our national past, simply cannot allow for the intrusion of fact into a worldview so thoroughly identified with fiction. But that white version of America is not only extraordinarily incomplete, in that it so favors the white experience to the exclusion of others; it is more than that; it is actually a slap in the face to people of color, a re-injury, a reminder that they are essentially irrelevant, their concerns trivial, their lives unworthy of being taken seriously. In that sense, and what few if any white Americans appear capable of grasping at present, is that “Leave it to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best,” portray an America so divorced from the reality of the times in which they were produced, as to raise serious questions about the sanity of those who found them so moving, so accurate, so real. These iconographic representations of life in the U.S. are worse than selective, worse than false, they are assaults to the humanity and memory of black people, who were being savagely oppressed even as June Cleaver did housework in heels and laughed about the hilarious hijinks of Beaver and Larry Mondello.

These portraits of America are certifiable evidence of how disconnected white folks were–and to the extent we still love them and view them as representations of the “good old days” to which we wish we could return, still are–from those men and women of color with whom we have long shared a nation. Just two months before “Leave it to Beaver” debuted, proposed civil rights legislation was killed thanks to Strom Thurmond’s 24-hour filibuster speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate. One month prior, Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus called out the National Guard to block black students from entering Little Rock Central High; and nine days before America was introduced to the Cleavers, and the comforting image of national life they represented, those black students were finally allowed to enter, amid the screams of enraged, unhinged, viciously bigoted white people, who saw nothing wrong with calling children niggers in front of cameras. That was America of the 1950s: not the sanitized version into which so many escape thanks to the miracle of syndication, which merely allows white people to relive a lie, year after year after year.

No, it is not the pastor who distorts history; Nick at Nite and your teenager’s textbooks do that. It is not he who casts aspersions upon “this great country” as Barack Obama put it in his public denunciations of him; it is the historic leadership of the nation that has cast aspersions upon it; it is they who have cheapened it, who have made gaudy and vile the promise of American democracy by defiling it with lies. They engage in a patriotism that is pathological in its implications, that asks of those who adhere to it not merely a love of country but the turning of one’s nation into an idol to be worshipped, if not literally, then at least in terms of consequence.

It is they–the flag-lapel-pin wearing leaders of this land–who bring shame to the country with their nonsensical suggestions that we are always noble in warfare, always well-intended, and although we occasionally make mistakes, we are never the ones to blame for anything. Nothing that happens to us has anything to do with us at all. It is always about them. They are evil, crazy, fanatical, hate our freedoms, and are jealous of our prosperity. When individuals prattle on in this manner we diagnose them as narcissistic, as deluded. When nations do it–when our nation does–we celebrate it as though it were the very model of rational and informed citizenship.

So what can we say about a nation that values lies more than it loves truth? A place where adherence to sincerely believed and internalized fictions allows one to rise to the highest offices in the land, and to earn the respect of millions, while a willingness to challenge those fictions and offer a more accurate counter-narrative earns one nothing but contempt, derision, indeed outright hatred? What we can say is that such a place is signing its own death warrant.

What we can say is that such a place is missing the only and last opportunity it may ever have to make things right, to live up to its professed ideals.

What we can say is that such a place can never move forward, because we have yet to fully address and come to terms with that which lay behind.

What can we say about a nation where white preachers can lie every week from their pulpits without so much as having to worry that their lies might be noticed by the shiny white faces in their pews, while black preachers who tell one after another essential truth are demonized, not only for the stridency of their tone–which needless to say scares white folks, who have long preferred a style of praise and worship resembling nothing so much as a coma–but for merely calling bullshit on those whose lies are swallowed whole?

And oh yes, I said it: white preachers lie. In fact, they lie with a skill, fluidity, and precision unparalleled in the history of either preaching or lying, both of which histories stretch back a ways and have often overlapped. They lie every Sunday, as they talk about a Savior they have chosen to represent dishonestly as a white man, in every picture to be found of him in their tabernacles, every children’s story book in their Sunday Schools, every Christmas card they’ll send to relatives and friends this December. But to lie about Jesus, about the one they consider God–to bear false witness as to who this man was and what he looked like–is no cause for concern.

Nor is it a problem for these preachers to teach and preach that those who don’t believe as they believe are going to hell. Despite the fact that such a belief casts aspersions upon God that are so profound as to defy belief–after all, they imply that God is so fundamentally evil that he would burn non-believers in a lake of eternal fire–many of the white folks who now condemn Jeremiah Wright welcome that theology of hate. Indeed, back when President Bush was the Governor of Texas, he endorsed this kind of thinking, responding to a question about whether Jews were going to go to hell, by saying that unless one accepted Jesus as one’s personal savior, the Bible made it pretty clear that indeed, hell was where you’d be heading.

So you can curse God in this way–and to imply such hate on God’s part is surely to curse him–and in effect, curse those who aren’t Christians, and no one says anything. That isn’t considered bigoted. That isn’t considered beyond the pale of polite society. One is not disqualified from becoming President in the minds of millions because they go to a church that says that shit every single week, or because they believe it themselves. And millions do believe it, and see nothing wrong with it whatsoever.

So white folks are mad at Jeremiah Wright because he challenges their views about their country. Meanwhile, those same white folks, and their ministers and priests, every week put forth a false image of the God Jeremiah Wright serves, and yet it is whites who feel we have the right to be offended.

Pardon me, but something is wrong here, and whatever it is, is not to be found at Trinity United Church of Christ.

Why Hillary’s been quiet as a churchmouse….

Barbara Ehrenreich has something to say about Hillary’s other religious life. Of course, we know something about these kinds of finaglings between religious conservatives and politicians, don’t we? Except for us Jamaicans, they are one and the same.

Obamarama: Not On My Watch!

Below is the response of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference regarding the media assaults on Rev. Wright. What a difference context makes: too many of our “prophets” in Jamaica don’t do much else besides preach fire and brimstone on queer folks and denouncing abortion. Gender politics aside (yes, I did notice that most of those who are labelled as prophets are men…) who among our religious leaders today will and do speak truth to power, regardless of the consequences for doing so?

(Also check out this Newsweek article about the prophet/politician issue)

“Not On My Watch!”

For nearly a year, I have been greatly disturbed by the attack on the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright and Trinity United Church of Christ, which has culminated in recent weeks into a media feeding frenzy that has tarnished everyone in the process. For 36 years, this man of the Gospel and noted theologian has faithfully served his church, his community and his God, by helping those who could not help themselves and by lifting up those who have lost hope. Dr. Wright’s ministry has been consistent and his commitment to the faith unmatched. While media critics, who have not spent a day in seminary, and have no idea how to exegete the Gospel, might find his sermons objectionable, Dr. Wright’s theology and sermonic delivery are deeply rooted in the faith and sacred traditions of Black Church.

For those who do not know Black Church or for those who simply have not taken time to do the research, here is a mini-history lesson. For the first 150 years of slavery, no organized religious bodies ever attempted to convert those who were enslaved. We established our own congregations and churches, based on our African-ancestored traditions mixed with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In the process, we became committed to the idea of freedom. There were over 300 known slave rebellions in the United States, the vast majority of which were led by preachers of that day, like Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner. Because of that, two white men had to always be present at any slave-led church service. Even while enslaved we had preachers and pastors who spoke to the needs of our condition.

Now, there have always been accommodationist preachers, those who go along to get along. In biblical terms, they are false prophets. A prophet is simply one who speaks on behalf of God and God’s people. A true prophet speaks truth to power and is not politically correct. The Old Testament prophets were not politically correct. The Apostle Paul was not politically correct. And Jesus, the son of God, was not politically correct. Jesus upset the status quo. He disrupted the comfortable. Remember, Jesus got angry and threw the money-changers out of the temple. Jesus raised some holy hell. So why can’t Dr. Wright?You see, true prophets speak for God, use colorful language and occasionally use a non-traditional method to get their message across.

There is a strong, historical and contextual relationship between the slave-preacher and the social justice, activist preacher of today. And there is a place and role for God’s angry prophets-think Amos, Micah, Isaiah and Jeremiah. They spoke on God’s behalf to kings, to the poor and to the enemies of their nation.Then there are the 20th and 21st century prophets like Vernon Johns, Martin Luther King Jr., Samuel DeWitt Proctor and Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. The difference between false prophets and true prophets is the false prophet speaks to what the masses and those in power want to hear. The true prophet speaks truth no matter how painful. There is a price to be paid for being a prophet. And Dr. Wright is now paying that price both publicly and privately.

It was author Alex Haley who underscored the role and relationship of the Black pastor and their congregations. He said, African American pastors are akin to the African griot, a leader, shepherd, father and the one in whom the story of one’s people has been embodied. For Trinity United Church of Christ and the greater African American faith community, Dr. Wright has been and is a formidable griot. At 81, I am an elder in this tribe of social justice preachers, but I, too, can say the legacy and reach of Dr. Wright’s ministry has influenced my faith.

So what has been lost in inflammatory rhetoric and the talking heads of the day is that Dr. Wright, a theological scholar who speaks five languages fluently, has inspired a church to create over 100 fully-functioning ministries, created seven separate corporations, led thousands to Christ, speaks Sunday after Sunday out of a long and storied, proud and prophetic tradition of our faith. And he speaks in the tradition of the slave-preacher and social justice proclaimer who believed in setting the captives free.

Dr. Wright represents the best among us, one of the best in this tribe of prophetic preachers. He has made his church a place where one could express the centuries-old pain of being Black in America, while finding strength for a brighter day. An attack on this man of the God is an attack on all those of the cloth who believe in the social Gospel of liberation. And I will not stand for it. Not on my watch. Not today.

Rev. Dr. Samuel B. McKinney
Pastor Emeritus
Mount Zion Baptist Church, Seattle Washington

Obamarama: Rev. Wright and the wrongs of NYTimes

If you’ve been paying attention for the past two weeks, you will know that white folks have got their knickers tied in all kinds of knots about Rev. Jeremiah Wright and whether he has ostensibly contaminated our dear angel Barack Obama with his fire-breathing assault on white supremacy. I’ll blog about some related issues soon. But, for now, here’s what Rev. Wright had to say to the NYTimes exactly one year ago about the smear campaign they were jumpstarting. Full text is in the TUCC bulletin of March 18, 2007.

March 11, 2007

Jodi Kantor
The New York Times
9 West 43rd Street
New York, New York 10036-3959

Dear Jodi:
Thank you for engaging in one of the biggest misrepresentations of the truth I have ever seen in sixty-five years.

You sat and shared with me for two hours. You told me you were doing a “Spiritual Biography” of Senator Barack Obama. For two hours, I shared with you how I thought he was the most principled individual in public service that I have ever met.

For two hours, I talked with you about how idealistic he was. For two hours I shared with you what a genuine human being he was. I told you how incredible he was as a man who was an African American in public service, and as a man who refused to announce his candidacy for President until Carol Moseley Braun indicated one way or the other whether or not she was going to run.

I told you what a dreamer he was. I told you how idealistic he was. We talked about how refreshing it would be for someone who knew about Islam to be in the Oval Office.

Your own question to me was, Didn’t I think it would be incredible to have somebody in the Oval Office who not only knew about Muslims, but had living and breathing Muslims in his own family? I told you how important it would be to have a man who not only knew the difference between Shiites and
Sunnis prior to 9/11/01 in the Oval Office, but also how important it would be to have a man who knew what Sufism was; a man who understood that there were different branches of Judaism; a man who knew the difference between Hasidic Jews, Orthodox Jews, Conservative Jews and Reformed Jews; and a man who was a devout Christian, but who did not prejudge others because they believed something other than what he believed.

I talked about how rare it was to meet a man whose Christianity was not just “in word only.” I talked about Barack being a person who lived his faith and did not argue his faith. I talked about
Barack as a person who did not draw doctrinal lines in the sand nor consign other people to hell if they did not believe what he believed.

Out of a two-hour conversation with you about Barack’s spiritual journey and my protesting to you that I had not shaped him nor formed him, that I had not mentored him or made him the man he was, even though I would love to take that credit, you did not print any of that.

When I told you, using one of your own Jewish stories from the Hebrew Bible as to how God asked Moses, “What is that in your hand?,” that Barack was like that when I met him. Barack had it “in his hand.” Barack had in his grasp a uniqueness in terms of his spiritual development that one is hard put to find in the 21st century, and you did not print that.

As I was just starting to say a moment ago, Jodi, out of two hours of conversation I spent approximately five to seven minutes on Barack’s taking advice from one of his trusted campaign people and deeming it unwise to make me the media spotlight on the day of his announcing his candidacy for the Presidency and what do you print? You and your editor proceeded to present to the general public a snippet, a printed “sound byte” and a titillating and tantalizing article about his disinviting me to the Invocation on the day of his announcing his candidacy.

I have never been exposed to that kind of duplicitous behavior before, and I want to write you publicly to let you know that I do not approve of it and will not be party to any further smearing of
the name, the reputation, the integrity or the character of perhaps this nation’s first (and maybe even only) honest candidate offering himself for public service as the person to occupy the Oval Office.

Your editor is a sensationalist. For you to even mention that makes me doubt your credibility, and I am looking forward to see how you are going to butcher what else I had to say concerning Senator
Obama’s “Spiritual Biography.” Our Conference Minister, the Reverend Jane Fisler Hoffman, a white woman who belongs to a Black church that Hannity of “Hannity and Colmes” is trying to trash, set the record straight for you in terms of who I am and in terms of who we are as the church to which Barack has belonged for over twenty years.

The president of our denomination, the Reverend John Thomas, has offered to try to help you clarify in your confused head what Trinity Church is even though you spent the entire weekend with us
setting me up to interview me for what turned out to be a smear of the Senator; and yet The New York Times continues to roll on making the truth what it wants to be the truth. I do not remember reading in your article that Barack had apologized for listening to that bad information and bad advice. Did I miss it? Or did your editor cut it out? Either way, you do not have to worry about hearing anything else from me for you to edit or “spin” because you are more interested in journalism than in truth.

Forgive me for having a momentary lapse. I forgot that The New York Times was leading the bandwagon in trumpeting why it is we should have gone into an illegal war. The New York Times became George Bush and the Republican Party’s national “blog.” The New York Times played a role in the outing of Valerie Plame. I do not know why I thought The New York Times had actually repented and was going to exhibit a different kind of behavior.

Maybe it was my faith in the Jewish Holy Day of Roshashana. Maybe it was my being caught up in the euphoria of the Season of Lent; but whatever it is or was, I was sadly mistaken. There is no repentance on the part of The New York Times. There is no integrity when it comes to The Times. You should do well with that paper, Jodi. You looked me straight in my face and told me a lie!

Sincerely and respectfully yours,

Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. ,
Senior Pastor
Trinity United Church of Christ

Obamarama: Intellectual-Politician

Small things I can quibble with, but, really, he gets the big picture…

Here’s the full transcript of the speech:

Barack Obama’s Speech on Race

Published: March 18, 2008 The following is the text as prepared for delivery of Senator Barack Obama’s speech on race in Philadelphia, as provided by his presidential campaign.

=================

“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk – to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign – to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one.

Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.

This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either “too black” or “not black enough.” We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.

And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.

On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way

But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:

“People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters….And in that single note – hope! – I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shame about…memories that all people might study and cherish – and with which we could start to rebuild.”

That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.

Legalized discrimination – where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy – particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

But I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs – to the larger aspirations of all Americans — the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives – by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Ironically, this quintessentially American – and yes, conservative – notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright’s sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination – and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past – are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds – by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina – or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

I would not be running for President if I didn’t believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation – the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.

There is one story in particularly that I’d like to leave you with today – a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King’s birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn’t. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”

“I’m here because of Ashley.” By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.

What does Peace look like? Part 1

Its hard to tell, especially when reading the website of the Violence Prevention Alliance, a network of organizations “working together to prevent violence in Jamaica.” There was never a single definition of “violence”, nor of the “peace” that is sought as an antidote. This is a definite red flag for me.

A few days ago, the said VPA organized a Peace March that took place in Kingston. I didn’t attend, much as I wanted to. But, in listening to and reading publicity related to the event, I was not feeling encouraged at all.

Here’s why:

On one hand, the symbolism of people gathered – whether out of curiosity or in general support of the idea – can have a powerful and meaningful effect. It is a collective stance that can reinforce – and even overwhelms – the commitment of one single individual. Marches are stock strategies in a movement. They are rallying cries; there’s nothing like being surrounded by hundreds and thousands of other people who believe the same thing you do. Its visceral, euphoric and wonderfully energizing. I used to be a march junkie.

On the other hand, you can only have that feeling when you are able to connect to broader goals and definition of the “problem” that makes up the movement. What I don’t know is what constitutes *this* particular movement. The VPA’s mission is to “to create violence – free and safe Jamaica”. Its focus is on “violence prevention”, a phrase liberally sprinkled through the website. Their focus is on “interpersonal violence” and not on “collective violence”. I don’t know what the latter is, and can’t imagine. They also make reference to “sub-types of violence” (!). Again, I don’t know what this means.  But the more I read the run-on sentences filled with jargon, the more skeptical I am becoming of the entire project.

All I am saying is that it would be nice to have a clear, working definition of the problem that everybody can understand, clear strategies for how to get there, and what the ultimate goal is.

For me, the inability (or refusal?) to provide a clear definition tells us that they are already working with one.  And one that is assumed, rather than stated, and may not be as inclusive as it should be. The group clearly works in a top-down fashion – they have flow charts and what have you about who fits where and reports to who etc. etc. Nice. In fact, while I think this information is meant to make the workings of the group more visible, I am not convinced of the openness of the group.

And if VPA works the way most Jamaican organizations work, it will be hell to try to get something done that the top dogs don’t like or rubber stamp. Those who are working on “subtypes” which are not popular or defined as useful will be lucky to get any attention, resources or support. Indeed, there are several members on the “board of directors” who themselves are only there because they have a “big job” or a “big name”, and will probably learn that they were never competent for the job for which they were hired. The best example for me is Mary Clarke, the children’s advocate. And then there is John Mahfood. Why is he on this board? Because ‘im brown and ‘im last name? Could somebody tell me what the hell he knows about violence (besides what he may have participated in or turned a blind eye to?) Is he actually willing to use his connections to corporations in order to put some dollars behind the various initiatives, or is he window dressing? I want to see the research on how board membership is determined in Jamaica; I bet this is no different from what fortune 100 companies in the US do; the study of “interlocking directorates” is what my much-hated first stats prof. made his big name on. Simply put: the same smaddy dem deh pon every blasted board; dem pick dem fren and dem fren fren, and so on. That’s why all the corporations seem to think alike and act alike on big policy issues. Their decision making is done by the same people! Look where that got us so far…

Then there is the sinister ideological crap they are pushing about family. What do you learn just by a quick review of the posters and the handbooks? A happy (peaceful and violence-free?) family is made up of a man, a woman, and the two children reading together. Apparently such families don’t have pets or animal companions. Nor do the parents treat their children or each other like crap. Worthy of a post in itself.

In fact, it becomes pretty clear that the focus of the work of “violence prevention” is not on “violence” but on murders and interpersonal violence using guns, knives, etc. That is, the stuff that many young men in the inner cities are participating in, and killing themselves while at it. Not surprisingly, this is also the violence that everybody has been up in arms about – how Jamaica is getting violent; all this violence has got to stop etc.

In all the bawling and wailing, we forgot to stop and think. I’ve been tracking reports of child abuse and violence against women as they have appeared in the newspaper since 2000, and mek me tell yuh sup’m. Conditions critical.

But, these esteemed folks at the VPA, who are the experts who are supposed to at least help us to do a little better on this matter, don’t seem all that interested in making it clear what we are facing and up against. They seem to work just the way the govament bodies work, which is not to stop to ask, well, shouldn’t we be clear what we are talking about and trying to work on? They probably did this though, and came up with this idea of “subtypes” (you can tell that kind of language is pissing me off, especially since there’s no adequate explanation for their process).

The other question that is not being answered is: is it really true to say that the society has become more violent, or is it that some forms of violence (like gun-related, bodily attacks etc.) are becoming more widespread. I do think the society has become more violent, but I can assure you, dead bodies are not the data that I used to draw my conclusions. The walking wounded are far more numerous among us: the ones who have never seen a gun or a dead body, but continually wear the bruises and wounds left by the hands, language and various implements and body parts that invaded their space, and told them (ad infinitum) that they are not human and do not deserve to be treated as such. And the walking wounded – not just the children that we are called to feel sorry for in the scaremongering that is going on – are all around us; they advocate for and make social policy right ya so that says it is acceptable to deny people, food, housing, jobs, etc. because of their social circumstances. Are they going to lay out what the situation is — hello? Statistics, pie charts and bar graphs buried on website are not going to do that job for you.

And shouldn’t we ask, rather than presume, what is causing and support this increase, rather than blame the same old scapegoats – those bad parents who can’t tek care o’ dem pickney and leggo dem pon di sosyati fi terrorize we; dat dam buggo buggo music wid di gun and sex and all dat? Where is the research to support these conclusions? Where is the research that individual agencies can use to guide their programs? Where is the information that all of the rest of us can use, besides hearsay, prejudice, etc.

So, we have a clear picture of the good parents; the VPA has shown us. And we have a clear picture of the bad parent. And I can assure you that VPA and I are not talking about the same things. I definitely recognize them when I see them and interact with their children. And I can assure you, those parents are not the ones above that are the focus of public ire and this mass effort to “resocialize” and teach them “parenting skills”.

You know the type that informs the thinking of VPA, and is constantly being referenced in the news accounts and soapbox speeches: the one that has sex in front of her children — put her children out on the street to hustle — don’t supervise har pickney dem — nuh know if har pickney dem go a school — lef dem go a dance — go to school and cuss and fight off the teacher — mek her babyfather dem sex off her gal pickney. Yes, that woman. She’s the epitome of the bad parent. Men are not really bad parents; just absent and forgot that is dem suppose to run tings.

For me, there is no such thing as a bad parent. But there are parents who really shouldn’t be, and who don’t know the first thing about what it means to parent. That’s an issue about the conditions under which they are parenting. I assume that people, with the best information possible, will do the best they can with what they have. The ‘bad parents’ are the ones who cannot be an example of virtue, kindness, compassion, generosity, intelligence and courage to anyone, not even their dog. And let me tell you (this is my bias speaking out loud and clear), I’m a serious breeder; I love for the ‘right’ kind of people to have children; more! more! more! having kids forces you to be even more human. The “right kind of people” are like a woman I met last night who when asked about her son, said he was doing really well. Then stopped and said – and you could feel the love and emotion in her words: “you know, it is wonderful being a mother to adult children; to see them make their way in the world and who I consider my best friends because we share a complex history that made all of us who we are, and we love each other for all that.” Her son decided that he was sick and tired of hearing all the bullshit and media propaganda about black people in France, so he and his mother are going to make a documentary about music in African and Caribbean immigrant communities there. That’s their vacation. These people are not rich in money, but rich in ideas, energy, compassion and a general sense that people ought to be able to live freely and fully, and their responsibility to humanity is to make that happen, however they do it.

But most of de so-called high-class people dem whe’ me find myself interacting wid in Ja, I really wish they hadn’t had children. I watch what their children are doing to this society and I cry sometimes. Mean, bad-mind, cubbitch, selfish, and narrow minded. These are the words that come to mind. They would think they are the cat’s pajamas because of what they have, where they have been, but who they are – uh uh. When you have people, and the children they raise, believe that the country is their playground, and who choose to spend their time and money on making more for themselves and demanding more and more from the society rather than contributing to building and strengthening our institutions, then I believe that we are victims of bad parenting. Too many of the children produced from these families that we are supposed to hold up as a “model”, are rude, inconsiderate, self-involved and feel entitled; if you knew me, you would know how much ah cyaaaa tek pickney who nuh have mannahs and regard fi odder people. No ‘defer to adults’ kind of manners – that’s not manners really — but have acquired a sense of empathy, curiosity, basic consideration and respect for other people, regardless of their circumstances. So, unless there is evidence for what exactly qualifies Lorna Golding or many of these columnists writing for the papers as experts on “parenting” and whether they can fulfill my criteria, I will denounce the abiding elitism that is at work here, and suspend other judgements until I have enough information.

If our so-called experts and policymakers thought about the message that they are sending about ‘poor people’ and ‘broken families’, they would recognize that they are actually doing violence to socially disadvantaged groups. Oh, that’s probably the collective violence that VPA is not interested in. And, they would recognize that the less people are treated as fully human and with dignity, the less likely they are to act as if they have regard for humanity. Through our language which conveys all our prejudices, we are helping to create and reinforce the very problem we claim to be trying to solve. If we had been doing that all along, we wouldn’t be so quick to demonize those bad parents.

Rather, VPA would be saying something different, and in the clearest, most accessible language:

Here’s what a just, violence-free and peaceful society looks like
Here’s what families, communities and individuals need to have in order for that to happen
Here are the groups that are working on issues, and here’s what they are doing
Here’s how we plan to inform public policy so these things can happen
Here’s what you can do to contribute to and get involved in this movement

Is that kind of clarity really too much to ask for?

Peace is not just about the absence of violence; it is a condition that has to be created and sustained.  I don’t think that these folks really understand that difference.  I strongly support anti-violence work, but such work has to be guided by something bigger than “we’re sick of this”; it has to be guided by a vision of what a different, better society would look like.  So far, VPA hasn’t offered me a vision that I can buy into.

just words

Nothing profound to say here; I think this quote that I found says a lot already.

“Do your little bits of good where you are; its those little bits put together that overwhelm the world.”  Bishop Desmond Tutu

Brand Jamaica = Brand Incivility

In today’s newspaper, there’s a very pointed critique of our national culture. Read it and think! All I can say at this moment, Amen, Amen, AMEN!

Misbehavin’ students: same sankey or new song?

From the tone of the commentary about students being disorderly and mouthing off to teachers, I guess many of us see ourselves as above the growing problem of student misbehavior, rather than part of it?

None of the instance that are reported in the media just fell out of the sky; there is a history that is not being reported or made available to us. Frankly, much of this reportage is not about helping us understand fix the problem; its all “drive by journalism”, fling a likkle sensationalism gi’ we and get people to say how yuh is a good reporter.

And frankly, the overly moralistic tone of the so-called experts absolutely sicken me. These are policymakers and that’s the best they could come up with? Oh my! Well, I never! My children would never do that! Those children are perverts! Those children are animals! That kind of answer takes no effort, and reflects that they aren’t thinking about or approaching the problem of indiscipline in schools with any more information or insight than the ordinary citizen. That’s very scary to think about. They are not paid or appointed to parrot self-righteous outrage; they are paid to assess, analyze and try to fix the problem. Whe’ all dem study whe’ dem a tek money from UNESCO, USAID fi do? How dem na’a do nutt’n? What dem a do wid di money dem? These are the questions we need to be asking!

Just to put some of this into context:

Pranks at school against teachers are nothing new; spit in the water? all of us could best that one if we had a chance, could get away with it, and especially when we don’t like the teacher. We might not do it ourselves, but we wouldn’t want to do a damn thing to stop it if we witnessed it anyway. That force called peer pressure, yes. A student stuffing a green mango in the muffler of the car belonging to a teacher who many of us hated still makes me chuckle, although I know it wasn’t the right thing to do at the time.

Physical intimidation of teachers? Well, to hear MB tell the story, its was something to be proud of, practically earning a badge of honour.

Feisty, hard-iyez pickney who constantly w’aa call dung crowd and bring dem generation dem fi come challenge teacher authority? A long time supp’n dem deh. Knowing this was a possibility was enough to make teachers at my primary school stop harassing and trying to beat a couple young women who came from a nearby neighborhood of ill-repute.

What’s different now is that schools and classrooms are official battlegrounds, and Jamaican teachers are definitely on the losing side because they never figured out other ways of gaining students’ respect besides demanding it, or beating and shaming deference out of children when they can’t get it any other way.

Students, no matter where they come from, are not fools. Teachers have lost all moral authority. They are not to be venerated or to be the first or last source of knowledge and wisdom because they have constantly compromised themselves. Taking bribes, showing favoritism, failing to take just stances, and doing all kinds of things to undermine the educational process — and the JTA and Min. of Educ. has turned a blind eye to all of it. Well, this is like chickens coming home to roost! I haven’t heard of any teachers being reprimanded, fired, or otherwise censured for beating children and verbally abusing them. They don’t even get held responsible for sexual assault that takes place on their watch (by the way, where were all the teachers when all these students were making their own porn movie in the school building???)

Have you witnessed the ways that many teachers interact with students in the classroom, talk about students, and face off with parents? The parents are the idiots and the archenemy, not partners in their children’s education. So much would be different if teachers took a different approach to what they do. But they don’t, no thanks to the lack of leadership and institutional support coming from on high. So, for every student that teachers insulted as “classless”, “wutless” and “bruk bad”, there are students sitting there feeling sorry for them, imagining how to get their own comeuppance, letting other bolder children do the dirty work of challenging authority for them, and convincing themselves that they are better and more deserving than those students. This is a recipe for how to breed complicity and aggressive disregard for rules and process. What is the process for students to report such abusive language? Oh wait, there’s none. That’s how we all talk to each other all the time: insults, patronizing and pejorative language is how we communicate; awareness of and respect for other people’s feelings? Nope, that’s not very Jamaican is it?

There is many a teacher that I wanted to tell off; I was angry enough, god knows; but I never do such a thing because my self-respect and reputation was at stake. For other students, cussing, stoning and spitting in the teachers’ water, well, that’s what get’s them respect from their peers. There is no kind of awareness among the students that tit does not equal tat. But, there’s no reason they should think otherwise is there? When this kind of intimidation is done by students to other students, the teachers have nothing useful to say or do about it. So, did these teachers in Ocho Rios somehow think it was not going to come their way? When a student can take an iron pipe and buss up a student’s head, I bet you a whole heap a fish an festival that teachers heard and knew about the tension between those boys, and took a stance; that is, they did nothing to alert the parent or to protect the student. So, what makes teachers think that parents should see them as having any authority or deserving of any kind of regard?

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: when teachers remain committed to being authoritarian prison guards rather than being educators, they are also fanning the flames of student revolt. Not the kind that produces useful social change, but the powder keg kind. Jamaican teachers have no respect for students as persons. Students are viewed as empty vessels who should sit quietly and let themselves be filled up with the teacher’s stuff — bile, prejudices and information, all of it. Well, those empty vessels can still scheme and act out; and if they are never taught how to resolve conflict in a peaceful, respectful way, and if teachers have not modeled this behavior, well, we get what we get and we shouldn’t get upset (my son says that all the time…). Except, I’m really, really pissed off about all of this.

Education is not about the lofty stuff some of us like to claim. Today, education is about teachers doing a”job” and complaining about their pay, while denigrating the students who they are paid to teach as not deserving of their time and effort. Any student who gets lifted up, encouraged, and challenged by a teacher are gaining something at the expense of the other students. Why? Because knowledge is still treated as a scarce commodity, a zero-sum game, to be given to those deserving, and denied to those who don’t deserve it.

Students are challenging authority, as children will do. There is a way to allow students to rebel and express their fears, disappointments, anger without anybody getting hurt, physically or emotionally. Except, there’s nothing in our school curriculum or programming that allows that to happen, or channels that in any productive way. Absent leadership and resources on the part of the MoE control machine, the only strategies that teachers seem to have is shaming, beating and putting students down – the old iron thumb; the students respond by using the weapons that they know will produce results – violence and hostile confrontation. None of this is good for anybody; the psychological pain that many students are in is unbelievable. Some don’t even want to go to school because of the violence. Teachers get increasingly removed from what they are doing and disinvested in the education process. This is definitely NOT good for us.

I am very critical of teachers (and administrators) in Jamaica because I happen to know a thing or two about education. And I know for sure that our teachers are not responding in nearly the ways they need to, in order to manage this problem which has been brewing for many, many years.

Demonizing the children, their families and their backgrounds is the easy response. Everyone is doing it.

Looking at what is going on in the classrooms and teachers’ role in it? A hole’ nedda sinting.

Memba sey anno di same day leaf drop inna wata, it rotten…

Livity,